When I was publicly announced as a Granta Best Young British Novelist, I was working in a wine shop. I felt insecure as no one else on the list seemed to work a job like mine, and I probably felt a little vain too: ‘Why is a Granta Best Young British Novelist being yelled at for shelving beer cans badly?’
I prematurely quit, which was a terrible mistake. I went hungry for weeks.
The wine and beer shop I worked in became the basis for one of the books I am currently writing, and my debut novel Children Of Paradise was about my experience working in a cinema. There is a separateness when you are working in a job that is not writing. That special part of you that likes to create doesn’t leak out, doesn’t have to expend any of its energy: it’s a golden pie floating within you. The pie gets cracked open in teaching and publishing and literary-related things, which can be bad, and sometimes good.
At the moment, I am living from a grant awarded to finish a book, reviewing and judging work, a few paid residencies here and there, teaching, cat-sitting and a bit of money from writing; this is generally what ‘writing full time’ means for me. I am anxious about the future, and that, to be honest, makes it hard to take advantage of this current moment.
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Most writers from a low-income background who have worked their way into the book industry will struggle to afford to live in London, New York or Dublin. I do not live in any of those cities as I could not afford to. Even still, I have borrowed money from friends, got bad credit from bills being due, moved back home, taken up emergency work, and skipped meals in order to keep writing.
It is a subject frequently discussed, written and thought about but the problem doesn’t get solved. In 2022, the median annual wage for a writer living in the UK was £7,000, according to a study reported in The Guardian newspaper. Yet it is not just about receiving more money as a writer, but to be told when it is coming in. The problem with writing money is you never know. It doesn’t follow the normal rules of other jobs where it arrives on a certain day of the month. It comes whenever, like flotsam on a beach, which is fine for the writer with a trust fund but for no one else. Payments which may seem big initially are cut into slices, and slowly handed out over several years. I am not convinced one author needs a million sum advance, when it could give ten authors one hundred thousand and so forth. The writer stands in front of a complicated and delicate financial structure, a kind of cruel Rube Goldberg machine. A late payment in one spot means having to take on some gig work which makes another project overdue. I feel an overwhelming mix of shame and embarrassment when I have worked writing money into my budget and it doesn’t arrive when I need it to. It feels like the book industry is laughing at me for not having a proper day job, for being presumptuous.
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In the past writers had other jobs outside of their writing but we don’t remember them for that. Long dead writers I admire, like Georges Perec, did not solely rely on writing for income. Perec spent time working as an archivist and librarian, for instance. There are still writing-adjacent jobs but not enough to sustain everyone and they are easiest to get for those with means and connections. A writer can work in the literary ecosystem, teaching, publishing, moderating, or they can do something separate: doctor, cleaner, bartender. Some writers don’t need to work outside of writing. A few are that rare thing: a commercial success. Others are independently wealthy, supported by trust funds or well-paid spouses, and that is fine until they pretend they are living solely off their writing, and not the trust fund or spouse. Money matters: whatever other job a writer does, whether shop assistant or professor, it is subsidising the publisher.
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It seems like the holy grail is writing full time, where your income is 100 per cent from books, and you can be your writer self all the time. In order for that to happen, you must have luck, and what you write has to match up at a particular time to what agents think they can sell, what publishers want to publish, and what the majority of reading people (itself a minority of people in general) want to read. Sometimes publishers put a lot of time and money into a book and it’s a big hit, other times it’s a flop. It’s not worth sacrificing the Marmite books I want to write for what might be popular and anyway the market is so unpredictable that today’s Marmite might be tomorrow’s ketchup.
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There is a natural cruelty to being a writer. I go through the world like a garbage truck or a gourmand, munching on life and turning it into literature. I know that solely existing in writing, reading, publishing, a literature department, is not good for my writing (the garbage truck, the gourmand, will consume itself), especially when things go downhill. With writing, if you have nowhere else to turn for joy, you fall into an abyss.
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Before I did as much reviewing, teaching, editing and judging as I do now, I was asked why I didn’t do those things before, and frankly, it was because I didn’t know how to get into that system. I only started doing it when people sought me out. I had to wait to be invited in.
I like reviewing because I care deeply about what I consider to be good literature and I can express my honest opinion related to that. It feels less transactional than not wanting to review at all because you are worried about offending someone and not getting blurbs. When I review or edit other people’s work, sometimes it is exciting, but it can be hard to get back to my own work. I will sit frigid for days after encountering a bad, overwrought simile, paranoid everything I write sounds like that too. Every terrible piece of writing (according to my own taste) requires an antidote of good writing to reinforce myself. I am learning, however, that bad writing can teach you how to write well just as much as good writing, that it can be a force to write against.
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From time to time I still need to work non-literary jobs. I don’t like my schedule to be dictated by someone else, especially if I’m on a good roll with a story. I dislike having to spit my gum out, using lots of chemical cleaners, being talked down to, or yelled at for having a book out during a quiet shift, or because a customer isn’t getting what they demand, having my ageing body broken by lifting and long hours of standing, realising your co-workers are getting younger and you aren’t.
I dislike all those things, but much worse is the primal fear of being unable to pay rent, of text notifications saying a bill payment didn’t go through, of endlessly checking my bank account. I was once locked out of my online bank account for signing in too many times in one day, checking to see if some writing money had come in. Another time I walked into Lidl with 78p in my bank account and a longing for a vegetable. I had to choose between a small bag of parsley and one of radishes. Even cabbages were out of my price range. I went with the parsley, because in richer times I had let a bag of radishes rot to grey slime in the bottom shelf of my fridge and still felt guilty about it. It was an invitation to madness to think about the fact I could afford the cabbage if a publisher’s payment wasn’t eight months overdue. I hadn’t found enough gig work in the meantime. A friend told me to fixate on a song when waiting for money, and I chose ‘The Biggest Aspidistra in the World’ by Gracie Fields. This was probably because of the Orwell novel about money, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, where, as I recall, the protagonist has to choose between buying a bus ticket and a condom.
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Since moving towards a more full time-ish literary existence (with the addition of cat-sitting, residencies, reviewing, etc.), I have become an obsessive hobbyist: weightlifting, taking combat classes at my council gym, swimming at a cold dirty beach in Edinburgh. I need to do other human things, to instigate little rebellions against my literary life. These rebellions are necessary to become the thing I rebel against in my writing. The writing life needs just as much tension as the writing itself to be good. I remember doing a government-funded youth employment program when working on my first book The Doll’s Alphabet, and skipping some sessions because the writing was going well, and getting into trouble with the program. That small rebellion, you and your writing against the world, is the most satisfying feeling of all.
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The fact that writing and reading is fun and fulfilling doesn’t stop it from being work, just as being a priest or a ballet dancer is still work. Often bartending and other jobs can be fun, especially when you are talking shit with your co-workers, it’s a quiet shift and you are all drinking ten sodas an hour, listening to your favourite music: those moments, more so than when a story is published, is when you momentarily think ‘I can’t believe I’m being paid for this,’ but then things can suddenly turn, the bar will get busy, or you will be sexually assaulted by a customer, someone will drink too much and you have to kindly cut them off, or you will wash hundreds of pint glasses which have been washed so many times already that they start to break in your hands. My literary jobs aren’t more upstanding or virtuous than my non-literary jobs. Bartenders or ushers do just as much good, or not, in the world as novelists do.
Eating free lasagne and drinking free wine at a book festival, then talking about yourself and your book is very different from being a bartender or cleaner, but it doesn’t come without cost. Writers may have overcome deep social anxiety to appear in public at the beckoning of their publisher; others have taken time off work to do the event and so being paid for this prevents a financial loss they could not afford. Last year, appearances at a book festival paid my September rent. The writing money I was expecting hadn’t arrived. I’d quit my job. But if I hadn’t quit my non-literary job, I wouldn’t have got the time off work to speak at the event. I was paid well for my time at the festival, for a few hours’ literary work, much better than I had gotten paid in the past working every day for a month as an usher at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, but one doesn’t do thirty days straight of paid book events, ever.
It’s a precarious and unnerving way of living. I would have done my life differently if I knew what I was in for, but my writing wouldn’t be my writing without my life being what it is. I don’t know what will happen to me in the future but I don’t blame myself entirely; I think the book industry needs to examine and restructure itself, even if just starting with something small and obvious, like telling you when you will be paid.
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This essay forms part of an ongoing series of reflections on the writing life edited by Olivia Fitzsimons.
Previously:
‘Days Left to Submission Deadline: Zero’ by Victoria Kennefick
‘The Waiting House’ by Marianne Lee
‘The Road (Not) Taken’ by Emily Cooper